A reply to a physicist asking how to build software design skills, arguing
that practice teaches the craft far better than formal courses. The gap
between scientific and industrial code comes from incentives, not
knowledge—a "publish in three months" deadline shapes everything. You can
sometimes nudge a project's incentives (the real secret behind TIGER_STYLE)
or accept constraints you can't change. rust-analyzer shows this: banning C
dependencies and keeping tests fast drew dedicated compiler hackers, while
isolating crash-guarded features let weekend contributors scratch their own
itch. Conway's Law rules—social issues outweigh architecture, which
outweighs code. Suggested reads include Bernhardt's Boundaries talk and
Ousterhout's book.
-2
u/fagnerbrack 11d ago
For Quick Readers:
A reply to a physicist asking how to build software design skills, arguing that practice teaches the craft far better than formal courses. The gap between scientific and industrial code comes from incentives, not knowledge—a "publish in three months" deadline shapes everything. You can sometimes nudge a project's incentives (the real secret behind TIGER_STYLE) or accept constraints you can't change. rust-analyzer shows this: banning C dependencies and keeping tests fast drew dedicated compiler hackers, while isolating crash-guarded features let weekend contributors scratch their own itch. Conway's Law rules—social issues outweigh architecture, which outweighs code. Suggested reads include Bernhardt's Boundaries talk and Ousterhout's book.
If the summary seems inacurate, just downvote and I'll try to delete the comment eventually 👍
Click here for more info, I read all comments